


Let your love expand outward

by Fatale (femme)



Series: domestic 'verse [3]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Babies, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 04:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femme/pseuds/Fatale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The final fic in the Domestic 'Verse.</p><p>Neal becomes a father, he's clueless, he gets a clue and then they all live happily ever after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let your love expand outward

Let your love expand outward

Peter/Neal/El  
PG-13  
W/C: 2,500

A/N: Done, omg. DONE! I may or may not write ficlets to wrap up loose ends and shit, but this is all I really wanted to say. I had a dream about this a month ago and have been putting off writing it because I’m not a great storyteller and I wasn’t sure I had the chops to pull it off. Still not sure I did the idea justice, but I’m happy. Enjoy!

Part one [Helpless, lovely](http://fatale.livejournal.com/238185.htm)  
Part two [Through an eternity of loneliness and joy](http://fatale.livejournal.com/238871.html)

 

 

ANNNNNNDDDDD NOW THE FINAL PART, PART THREE.

 

 

 

 

Neal comes over to Peter and El’s house to eat at least four days a week. After a month, El buys a small crib, which they shove into the corner of the living room. It only makes sense to have one at their house, too.

Eventually, it moves to the spare bedroom and Neal brings over his baby monitors, which really don’t serve much of a purpose in his apartment, since it’s so small.

 

*

 

He sends postcards to Alex, whenever he can get a handle on her location, with small updates about Sofia in code.

She never responds, if she gets them.

Mozzie gets wind of a job that went south for her in Paris. With a dull ache in his chest, Neal thinks about what kind of men are coming for her, how they might like to hurt her. His first instinct is to help, to wade back into the messes she’s made and try to unravel them in a way that keeps them all safe, but he thinks of Sofia, tiny and helpless, and stops sending postcards, stops tracking Alex’s movements at all.

He’s pretty sure Mozzie keeps tabs on her, maybe makes a few phone calls to help her out, but if he does, Moz doesn’t say and Neal doesn’t ask.

 

*

 

The first time Sofia rolls over, she’s on a blanket spread out on the floor in-between Neal and El, while they’re staying up to watch the TCM Hitchcock marathon and waiting for Peter to come home from the office. He’s been coming home early lately, but he still needs to work late on occasion to finish up paperwork. He sent Neal home hours ago.

For weeks, Sofia’s been doing what looks to Neal like tiny baby push-ups.

El shrieks, and Neal feels a small part of his spirit leave him in fright.

“What happened?” he gasps, heart stuttering painfully.

“She rolled over!”

He leans forward to eye Sofia critically. “Oh, yeah?”

El’s scrambling to find her purse, and she pulls her phone out. She snaps pictures excitedly. “We have to show Peter.”

“The pictures just kind of look like she’s laying around, which is pretty much what she always does. I think we need a video camera,” Neal says. He turns Sofia over to see if she’ll do it again, but she seems unimpressed with all the fuss and promptly falls asleep.

Neal doesn’t say anything when a week later, a new camcorder shows up on the coffee table.

 

*

 

Peter and El pass looks between them all evening, secretive wordless communications that make Neal ache with an unhappiness he can’t pin down. Neal realizes with an unpleasant jolt that he’s spend five days in a row at their house, and probably, they would like him to clear the hell out so they can have some alone time.

He makes his excuses and leaves early that night, with Sofia bundled up tightly against the cold.

 

*

 

Peter invites him over for dinner every night for the next two weeks and Neal politely demurs each time.

After packing up the files he’s working on Neal heads to the door, and throws one last glance over at his shoulder. Peter’s standing on the landing, staring at him, and he can’t figure out why in the world Peter looks like his heart’s breaking.

 

*

 

Neal gives Sofia her nightly bath, and she cries and cries, even though he’s careful to keep her warm. It takes hours to get her to settle down.

“Yeah, I miss them, too,” Neal says to her.

 

*

 

Neal works on a seemingly endless stream mortgage fraud cases. He has the sneaking suspicion that Peter’s avoiding the more dangerous cases they tend to work on. He’s trying not to be pissed that Peter’s taking the choice out of his hands, but secretly, he’s a little relieved, too.

It can’t last forever, catching hardened criminals is what they do.

Even though not dying has always been extremely high on his list of priorities, Neal knows he should probably pick out Godparents for Sofia. Mozzie and June would be the obvious choices. Mozzie has been great with Sofia, but he remembers Mozzie’s rubber baby and flinches a little at the memory.

Besides, he doesn’t want his daughter growing up to the soundtrack from _Tiles of Fire_ I, II, III, IV, and V.

 

*

 

His mom calls at strange times. Their conversations are strained and weighted down with everything they won’t talk about.

She asks, one day, if he’s happy.

Neal thinks about his answer, tests the weight of it on his tongue, then tells her the only truth he knows.

“I’m trying to be,” he says.

 

*

 

It’s been months since Neal’s been in a store for any amount of time that doesn’t have cartoons on the walls. He’d taken to doing his shopping quickly, popping in and out of stores on his way home from work for the bare essentials, but the list of things he’d like to have in the apartment is getting kind of epic. So he straps Sofia to his chest and heads out.

He runs into Elizabeth.

She looks startled to see him. “Hi,” she says, her face pulled into carefully neutral lines.

“This is a little out of your neighborhood, isn’t it?”

“Meeting another client around here in an hour. Thought I’d pick up a few things we need to kill some time,” she says. She reaches out a hand to touch Sofia, and stops halfway there, her hand outstretched awkwardly. “May I?”

Neal lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “You know you don’t ever have to ask.”

She smiles and runs a finger over Sofia’s chubby cheek, slow and careful. “I missed her.”

Neal laughs. “What about me?”

Her startled blue eyes meet his. “You, too,” she says seriously.

Elizabeth’s mouth is down-turned, unhappy, and there are small grayish smudges under her eyes. “Come over later tonight,” she says, her voice soft and unsure, for all that it’s a command and not a question.

“I will,” Neal agrees, ignoring the painful way his heart clenches, the lingering scent of her perfume in his nose.

 

*

 

Dinner is easy and uncomplicated. Peter looks thrilled that he’s there, which Neal doesn’t let himself read in to too much.

He helps El load the dishwasher while Peter feeds Sofia her bottle, with easy, practiced movements. She’s already started on a mix of solid foods and formula. Mozzie told him to make a list of what he’s given her, and to only introduce one food at a time to check for possible allergies.

After they’re done, El grabs his wrist. “Stay,” she says.

“The night? Sure.”

She nods once and begins wiping down the counter, even though she looks like she wants to add something else.

“Do you think you and Peter would want to be Sofia’s Godparents?” Neal asks absently.

“What?”

“You don’t have to,” Neal rushes to assure her. “Not if you don’t want--”

“Shut up, Neal. Of _course_ we do.”

“Good. Great. We can make it legal next week.” He tries not so sound as genuinely surprised and pleased as he feels.

 

*

 

They play Monopoly after Sofia’s been put to bed. The extra tension in his shoulders he’s been carrying for months loosens. Neal hasn’t had much to drink since he got Sofia, so the glass of wine he’d had with dinner must be affecting him more than he’d thought.

“Didn’t think you’d want to take Sofia,” he says to Peter, counting out multicolored dollar bills with more excitement than is strictly healthy. They’d be stupidly easy to counterfeit, he thinks. _Fools._

Peter stops, the dice in his left hand. “Why not?”

“You’re not really a baby kind of guy.”

“Neither are you,” Peter points out. “Besides, I’m not.”

Neal looks up at him, sets down the money. “Then why--”

“Because she’s yours,” Peter says and rolls the dice.

 

*

 

Neal comes over nearly every night after that. A fine layer of dust settles over everything in his apartment, but he doesn’t bother cleaning it up because he’s not going to be there long, anyway.

All of Sofia’s stuff seems to migrate over to Peter and El’s place, piece by piece.

One morning, El hands him a bunch of paint chips and tells him to pick a color. They talk about it a little and they settle on a dusty rose for the guest bedroom, now clearly Sofia’s room.

Sofia will undoubtedly grow out of the color, but it’s a lovely, muted pink and Neal’s a secret traditionalist.

He brings over his paints and draws a mural on the ceiling, reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but without all the sadness and longing of the original. This one is happy and hopeful and dreamy.

 

*

 

Neal keeps extra suits in the guest bedroom closet, his shaving kit is spread out all over the bathroom counter. El begins buying the granola cereal he eats in the morning and soy milk, which Peter uses when they run out of regular milk and grumbles and makes displeased noises all through breakfast.

When Elizabeth gets frustrated that she can never remember whether Neal likes pulp in his orange juice or not, he begins making the shopping trips with her and he foots the bill, because, hey, it’s the least he can do.

They take Sofia with them, and people keep coming up to tell them what a beautiful family they make - all dark glossy hair and impossibly blue eyes. El’s visibly flustered the first time, obviously trying to explain that they aren’t married, but Neal just smiles widely and plants a showy kiss on her cheek and keeps calling her _baby_ , _darling_ and _sweet cheeks_ until she laughs and hits him with a loaf of bread.

 

*

 

Peter buys Sofia a mobile with pink and brown butterflies and clips it above her crib. He turns it on and Brahms Lullaby fills the room.

He lays her down, lingers over her for a moment, then kisses her cheek, inhaling deeply. Neal knows what he’s smelling - it took him by surprise, too - something milky, powdery, innocent.

Neal watches from the doorway and doesn’t say anything.

 

*

 

Unexpectedly, Peter’s an Amazon.com fiend - every day, there’s a new package on the doorstep, something huge and garish for Sofia. To develop her motor skills, Peter explains and Neal instantly regrets buying him all those baby books.

“You’re going to spoil her,” Neal says.

“She’s a baby, she doesn’t know how much I buy for her.”

“Not yet,” Neal says reasonably, “but she’ll figure it out eventually.”

Peter seems pleased at the ‘eventually’.

Less than a week after Neal thinks they’ve laid down some kind of ground rules, Peter buys her a toy chest with roses painted on the top around her name. Peter hesitates when he tells Neal about it over breakfast. There’s not really enough room for a toy chest and a full-sized bed in the guest room. It’s already crammed; Neal has to literally crawl over the bed to get into the closet.

The unspoken question hangs in the air with so much weight, it feels like a physical, stifling thing.

Neal looks across the room and really lets himself see it for the first time - the toys and stuffed animals strewn across the floor, the stack of dog-eared baby books on the table - and thinks, _Oh_.

He’s not totally oblivious, he’s seen this coming in his periphery, but he’s been determinedly unwilling to face it head on. When Sofia had first come into his life, Peter had told him that he’d never known Neal to avoid anything out of fear.

He looks at Peter deliberately for a long moment and then says, “So get rid of the bed.”

To his own ears, it sounds like a challenge.

Peter loves challenges.

Peter hadn’t been exactly right when he’d said that stuff about Neal not avoiding fear, it’s more that Neal typically avoids _situations_ when he suspects he’ll feel fear, but Sofia’s been thrust on him without a choice and Peter and El aren’t really a choice, either.

Wariness and happiness churn together low in his belly as Neal takes a bite of his toast.

 

*

 

That night, El squeezes his hand and tells him they’re going to bed. She leaves the question open-ended, but puts a few quilts and a pillow on the couch, just in case.

He follows them up the stairs.

Neal knows he looks larger out of his suit, it’s one of those strange optical illusions clothes play. Peter out of his clothes looks softer, kinder, more disarming than ever.

Peter’s large hands fit into the notches at his waist perfectly, like they’ve always been there and Neal’s just grown around them, grown to fit into the tiny grooves between Peter and El like a key.

The bed creaks under their weight while Peter repeats his name in the same disbelieving tone.

The baby mobile plays softly through the static on the monitor while Peter presses kisses against his sweaty neck with dry, chapped lips. Against his side, El sighs softly, her dark hair fanned out against the white pillow, fingers tangled up in his. Neal twists his head sideways to kiss her over and over again, running his tongue along her teeth, her bottom lip, flushed and full.

He closes his eyes, arches into Peter’s touch.

 

*

 

Saturday evening has become movie night. None of them have anywhere to be the next day, so they can stay up as late as they want and take turns waking up with Sofia, if needed. But she’s sleeping great these days.

Neal pops two bags of popcorn and dumps them into a large bowl.

From the door, Neal surveys the scene: Peter laying on the couch, Sofia dozing on his chest, Elizabeth waiting for him on the floor with pillows piled high behind her back, leaning into Peter’s side. She catches Neal’s eye and pats the space next to her invitingly.

For a moment, Neal feels devastated, undone and stripped bare - these people belong to him and he belongs to them, totally and completely.

He thinks about what he’ll tell Sofia when she’s older, about how much life hurts, how complicated it can get, how many hard choices there are. All the ugly things people do for love.

But not right now, not for a long time. He’ll shield her for as long as possible. It’s scary for all his hopes and fears and wants to be wrapped up in one tiny person, but it helps to have other people to share the burden.

First, Neal decides, he’ll tell her about love and the heart’s endless search for joy, and how all of it is possible if you wait and you hope and get very lucky.

 

 

 

 

The end. For real.

 

 

Thanks for reading. Much love to you all, may you get lucky in love and life as well. ♥


End file.
